Improving fuel economy in vehicles is an important goal. Many technologies are being applied to optimize efficiency, including but not limited to displaying progressive shift indicators, predictive neutral coast, and the like. However, there is currently no way to characterize actual fuel consumption performance that can be compared across differing power demands. Existing techniques for characterizing fuel consumption may simply look at fuel rate in isolation, or may consider overall fuel consumption. However, using these techniques does not take into account changing power demands. For example, a Class 8 truck towing a heavy load would be expected to consume more fuel over a given drive cycle than the same truck towing a light load, but the consumption of more fuel in the first scenario should not be considered less efficient. Further, existing techniques do not allow for performance of vehicles in the field to be compared apples-to-apples to performance of test configurations in order to troubleshoot issues or further improve efficiency. What is needed are new systems and techniques that allow for comparison of fuel consumption efficiency across different loads and operating conditions.